Gov. Pat Quinn’s spokesman Abdon Pallasch used to write for the Chicago Sun-Times. I don’t think he was a journalism critic there, but in his new role working for the state, he has become one.

Pallasch, emailing the Register Star Editorial Page Editor Wally Haas from “il.gov” last week, took issue with a column by Scott Reeder that this newspaper ran. Pallasch rebutted points with which the governor’s office disagreed. That’s legitimate.

But Pallasch stumbled into the world of “not fine” when he questioned whether Reeder, who has covered state government for two decades for newspapers, is practicing bonafide journalism because he now works for The Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative policy and research organization.

“The Illinois Policy Institute is not a journalism organization nor is it independent,” Pallasch wrote. He then “informed” us that the group is “a Koch Brothers-linked interest group that refuses to disclose where it gets its $3 million in ‘donations’ a year.”

Pallasch also said “The Charles Koch Institute lists the Illinois Policy Institute as a ‘partner organization’ for its ‘Liberty@Work’ program. The Koch Brothers Institute lists internships at IPI.”

And I say, so what? Uber-liberal billionaire George Soros funds liberal groups, and the libertarian Koch Brothers fund conservative groups. But in this country it has never been any government official’s job to define what’s journalism and what isn’t.

Such criticism would be fine if it came from Quinn’s Democratic re-election campaign, but not from the governor’s office. I’m surprised because this is out of character for Quinn, who takes great pains to distinguish between his role as governor and his role as partisan politician. I learned how careful he is firsthand when I set out in October 2010 to spend a day with Quinn’s Democratic campaign.

I showed up at 8 a.m. at Quinn’s campaign headquarters in Chicago on the 600 block of North LaSalle Street. After talking with campaign staffers, one of them said I would not be traveling with the Democratic candidate for governor. Instead, I would accompany the governor. A campaign aide drove me to Illinois’ defacto capitol building, the James R. Thompson Center, 100 W. Randolph St.

I was soon riding in the back seat of a black Illinois State Police dreadnought with the governor of the Land of Lincoln. It was only then that I learned the governor would be visiting suburban cities and Rockford, awarding millions of dollars worth of “River’s Edge Grants” in civic ceremonies attended by local officials milling around as only local officials can do. Never once did anybody mention that the governor was running for election.

The Pallasch letter isn’t the first instance I’ve encountered this year of attempts by elected officials’ staffers to define “journalist.”

Page 2 of 2 - U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-East Moline, formerly a Quad City Times reporter and editor, limited coverage of a recent meeting in Rockford to “accredited reporters.” And when U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., had a crime summit in Rockford last spring, he limited coverage of his news conference so that it kept out a conservative blogger who had come from Chicago.

Our elected state and federal officials have real work to do, fixing the broken governments in which they serve. The people and the press will decide the definition of “journalist,” as the Constitution’s writers intended when they said in the First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”